Making Plays as a Team

Sam Hurwitt

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, March 5, 2006

Photo: Brant Ward

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Making Plays as a Team

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Central Works has a particular method of creating new plays. First the members figure out who the playwright and director are going to be, come up with a rough concept or subject for the play (a "departure point," as they put it), then figure out how many actors they'll need and cast the play before they write it. The play is then conceived collaboratively in 100 workshop sessions with the writer, director, actors and sound designer -- at first just researching and brainstorming, and finally having group script sessions discussing what the writer has come up with. Once the rehearsals start, they fall into more traditional roles of director, playwright and actors.

In Brian Thorstenson's "Shadow Crossing, " for instance, the subject came first, and the play was written around it. The first play in Central Works' new season now playing at the Berkeley City Club, it's about immigration and issues of citizenship: what makes people value citizenship, renounce it, seek it or seek to deny it to someone else.

The company has been using its collaborative method exclusively since 1997, initially at the urging of director Gary Graves, who first encountered it while working as an assistant on Berkeley Repertory Theatre's production of Caryl Churchill's "Mad Forest" directed by Mark Wing-Davey.

"The difference from project to project is that departure point," says Graves, who has written most of the company's plays and directed many of them. "In this case, it was really an abstract idea, an issue of citizenship, but it might be a Chekhov short story or a story from 'The Iliad.' You can really fit anything in there, but what's consistent is that the writer and the director are chosen, the actors are all present before the play begins."

The unorthodox process, inspired by one used by the United Kingdom's Joint Stock Theatre Company to spawn such works as Churchill's "Cloud Nine," can be "scary for a director," says company co-director Jan Zvaifler, who's in "Shadow Crossing" as an actor but is directing the group's next play, an adaptation of Gogol's "The Inspector General," in June. "It's funny to come into material where your knowledge is no greater than anybody else's in the room. We're all on the same footing here, and now I have to tell you what you're going to do."

One advantage of the Central Works way of doing things -- and it's not a small one -- is that it is pretty much the opposite of the normal playwright's plight of workshops, workshops and more workshops.

"It's a very, very, very appealing thing," playwright Thorstenson says. "I couldn't have had more generous, patient and compassionate collaborators. They knew when the playwright normally freaks out and when to tell me I really needed to calm down.

"The thing that you have with this kind of process is an immediate chance to hear the play. I'd bring in a scene and hear it and go, 'Ah, OK, that doesn't work. Throw it out.' "

What emerged from the workshops was a story of three people in radically different positions regarding immigration: a Mexican man attempting to come to the United States to find work; a gay man considering leaving the United States because of the political atmosphere; and a white grade-school teacher who's joined the Minuteman Project to try to stem the tide of illegal immigration.

The germ of the play started with Thorstenson's initial misreading of an article in the Nation by David Cole, author of the book "Enemy Aliens."

"(Cole) tracks the historical precedents in how the United States has dealt with foreigners and immigrants," Thorstenson says. "Whenever rights have been taken away from foreigners, that's often seeped over to American citizens. The most obvious example is the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

"In this article it talked about two of the last people on Ellis Island, and I thought the article said the two last people on Ellis Island before they closed it in 1954. Where that took us was actually pretty interesting, because one of the people was an American war bride who literally spent three years trying to get into the country. She was a German Jew, she worked for the British army and the American Army, her husband was a GI, and they kept holding her on Ellis Island because they thought she was a Communist. But they didn't tell her that."

"They just held her without giving her an explanation -- which has some contemporary parallels," Zvaifler adds. "So it seemed like an interesting departure point."